Child immigrants to the "edge of empire" : Fairbridge child migrants and British Columbia's quest for the construction of the "white man's province"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in the 1860s British children participated in migration schemes to Canada. Philanthropists, motivated by evangelical beliefs and despair at the state of childhood for homeless and dependent children in Britain, would send 80,000 British boys and girls to Canada between 1867 and 1929. Placed with Canadian families in rural communities, the schemes directed these children toward lives as farm labourers and housewives. By the 1920s, rampant opposition to these child migration schemes in central and eastern Canada brought about their termination. Opponents of child migration, mobilized the language of eugenics to condemn the children sent to Canada as “degenerate castoffs” of British society, and argued that the children were beyond saving and posed a threat to Canadian society. This was not the end of child migration to Canada, however, for in 1935 the Fairbridge Society, a rescue organization, opened the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School in British Columbia. This final scheme would see 329 children sent to British Columbia before its demise in 1950. The earlier period of child migration to Canada, 1860 to 1929, has received the majority of scholarly attention with the recommencement in 1935 often overlooked. This thesis examines how the Fairbridge Farm School at Cowichan Station was able to open and operate in British Columbia without popular opposition by exploring how British Columbian constructions of whiteness were projected onto and internalized by the operators of the Farm School and its children, and in doing this incorporate the Fairbridge Farm School into the larger narrative of child migration to Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".